Conventionally, wire bonding by gold wire have been used to mount semiconductor chips on the printed circuit boards. The gold wire is connected on both ends with electrodes located on the semiconductor chip and the printed circuit board.
As the lead count of semiconductor chips increases, and the pad pitch on the chip decreases, the pad pitch on the printed circuit boards is decreasing. Hence, the pad density of the recent printed circuit boards is so high that it is almost impossible to manufacture with the ordinary printed circuit board technology. Multilayer boards and multiple bonding shelves have been developed to alleviate the pad density on the printed circuit boards.
These printed circuit boards have been made by technologies such as laminating boards having preformed larger and smaller openings and by fabricating a printed circuit board with bonding shelves (e.g. Japan Examined Patent 2-5014, Japanese Examined Patent 5-41039), or by laminating pre-fabricated cores to form multilayer boards, and etching the opening by a laser (applied by the author, Japanese Application Patent 7-171391). The conventional printed circuit boards having multiple bonding shelves mentioned above were complex in manufacturing technology, and also costly, and a less expensive process is desired. On the other hand, some problems were left in wire bonding, since the multiple bonding pads had level differences.
This invention aims to solve the problems inherent in conventional printed circuit boards. The objective of this invention is to provide printed circuit boards for mounting semiconductor chips which can be fabricated in a simple manner with inexpensive cost while maintaining high density bonding pads, and also keeping the level difference to a minimum to make wire bonding easy.